The conversation around IBM i (formerly AS400, iSeries) modernization has entered a new era. Two landmark launches — IBM Bob (formerly Project Bob), which reached general availability in March 2026, and Programmers.io’s TimeBridge™, were announced the very same week, and have arrived at precisely the right moment for enterprises running mission-critical operations on IBM Power systems. Both offerings target the same fundamental challenge: how do you modernize decades-old RPG, COBOL, and legacy IBM i applications without disrupting the business logic that keeps your operations running?
These tools aim to tackle these challenges in ways that haven’t been preceded in the IBM i space. In this blog, we offer a deep technical overview of each solution as well as our take on how this affects IBM i/AS400 enterprises worldwide.
What IBM Bob Brings to the IBM i Ecosystem
IBM Bob is IBM’s AI-first integrated development environment, built on a fork of Visual Studio Code and powered by a multi-model architecture that combines IBM’s own Granite foundation models with Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral AI. For the IBM i community (a platform that runs a significant share of Fortune 500 companies), Bob represents the most significant tooling advancement in this current generation.
At its core, Bob functions as an agentic AI development partner across the full software development lifecycle. Within the IDE itself, it operates in multiple modes: Architect Mode for scoping and designing complex system changes, Code Mode for rapid implementation and iteration, and Orchestrator Mode that coordinates specialized agents across code generation, test creation, documentation, and CI/CD pipelines simultaneously. This is not an autocomplete tool. Bob reads your entire repository, understands your codebase’s architecture, and ensures that when it makes a change anywhere, that change propagates intelligently and consistently across every affected file.
For IBM i developers specifically, Bob’s value is amplified by its deep platform fluency. It handles RPG in all its generations: RPG III fixed-format, ILE RPG, SQLRPGLE, and free-format RPG IV, along with CL, DDS, SQL, COBOL, Java, Python, and PL/I. This means a developer who has been maintaining fixed-format RPG III programs from the 1990s can prompt Bob to explain what a legacy subroutine does, then ask it to refactor that code to modern free-format RPG IV. Bob will then execute that transformation with full awareness of IBM i platform characteristics, including Db2 for i performance behavior and IBM i security architecture.
The internal productivity numbers from IBM reports are compelling. IBM teams reported major efficiency gains with Bob, including a 70% reduction in time spent on selected tasks, and roughly 69% faster completion of code generation and refactoring work—often reducing days to hours. Bob is also notable for its enterprise-grade security posture. It ships with built-in Semgrep scanning for inline vulnerability detection, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and PCI compliance awareness, and flexible deployment options that support on-premise, private cloud, and air-gapped environments to satisfy data-residency requirements. Bob’s BobShell CLI extends all of these capabilities directly into the terminal, making it native to CI/CD pipelines as well as the IDE.
In short, IBM Bob gives IBM i organizations — for the first time — an AI coding partner that genuinely understands the platform, not just the code.
What TimeBridge™ Brings to the IBM i Ecosystem
In tandem, Programmers.io launched TimeBridge™ as a comprehensive modernization framework specifically designed for multi-year, multi-stakeholder IBM i/AS400 transformation initiatives in manufacturing, retail, transportation, banking, finance, insurance, and logistics — the industries where IBM i most heavily concentrates and where operational risk is highest. The offering is structured around three integrated pillars that address the full scope of what often makes modernization efforts succeed or fail.
TimeBridge™ Insight delivers the advisory foundation, and includes modernization assessments, transformation blueprints, and structured roadmaps tailored to the specific operational and compliance requirements of complex IBM i environments. This is where enterprises gain clarity before a single line of code is touched.
Through a thorough, verified AI-assisted system analysis, this is where stakeholders will get answers to a few key questions: Which applications should be prioritized? Where do we see the highest risk? Which business rules are implicitly encoded in undocumented RPG and will break if translated incorrectly? What is the right sequencing for a multi-year transformation that keeps production systems stable throughout?
TimeBridge™ Technologies is the AI-assisted execution layer — a set of tools and methodologies used to analyze, document, and transform legacy codebases efficiently while maintaining the governance, quality, and behavioral equivalence that regulated and operationally intensive industries require.
All technologies in this layer are ISO 42001-certified for AI system management, transparency, and security, and tackle critical use cases like integrations, UI, database replication, and more. This pillar is where TimeBridge™ leverages AI not as a replacement for expertise, but as a safe and ethical accelerator of it.
TimeBridge™ Experience provides access to one of the world’s largest teams of IBM i specialists, which includes Programmers.io’s bench of 300+ IBM i developers, consultants, and IBM Champions. The Programmers.io team averages over 10 years of platform experience per consultant, backed by the company’s industry-unique Happiness Guarantee. These are experts who have worked with every generation of RPG, who understand the subtle behavioral differences between RPGLE and SQLRPGLE for Db2 for i operations, and who can review AI-generated code not just for syntactic correctness but for production-readiness on IBM Power hardware.
The Shared Philosophy: AI as Accelerator, Not Replacement
Both IBM and Programmers.io have arrived independently at the same conclusion about the right role for AI in IBM i modernization. IBM Bob is explicitly designed to work alongside experienced developers, not replace them. Its modes are structured to ensure human review and approval at every step. As Bob suggests, plans, and implements, the developer still governs what ships. As one early tester noted: “You will still want to review the code. You will still want to test the code.” Bob is a powerful accelerator, but sound judgment about IBM i production systems should still belong to humans.
TimeBridge™ is built on the same principle. The offering bundles AI-assisted tools with advisory services precisely because Programmers.io recognizes what IBM i practitioners have long understood: the fact that the complexity of legacy modernization is not primarily a code translation problem. It is a business continuity problem, a risk management problem, and a knowledge preservation problem. AI can accelerate the code analysis and transformation work substantially, but without the structural framework TimeBridge™ provides, and without the platform expertise that Programmers.io’s IBM i specialists bring, even the most capable AI tool will encounter the gaps that cause modernization projects to stall or fail.
Why This Moment Matters for IBM i Organizations
The pressure organizations face to modernize IBM i/AS400 systems is not new, but it has intensified. According to IT Jungle, a recent Kyndryl study found that enterprise interest in applying LLM technologies to IBM i and System Z applications is “exploding”. The skills gap is real; IBM i experts are retiring and taking decades of institutional knowledge with them, making the pipeline of developers who know RPG and CL deeply incredibly thin. At the same time, businesses that run IBM i are being asked to integrate with cloud platforms, expose APIs to modern applications, connect to ERP systems, and support real-time analytics that their legacy architectures were not designed to deliver.
The advent of tools like IBM Bob’s AI-first development capabilities and TimeBridge™’s structured modernization framework provides IBM i organizations with something that has not existed before: a complete, enterprise-grade answer to the modernization challenge that does not require choosing between speed and safety, AI assistance and human expertise, modern tooling and deep platform knowledge.
Programmers.io’s position as leaders in IBM i development means that the human expertise layer of TimeBridge™ is the deepest and most reliable pipeline available in the market. Pair that with the latest advancements in AI-powered tools, and IBM i organizations in manufacturing, retail, logistics, healthcare, and financial services have the most capable modernization stack available today.
Getting Started
If your organization is maintaining IBM i applications and weighing your modernization options, the best first step is a structured assessment — the foundation of what TimeBridge™ Insight delivers. Understanding your current application landscape, identifying the highest-risk interdependencies, and building a transformation roadmap that accounts for operational continuity is the work that makes everything else succeed.
Programmers.io consultants bring an average of 10+ years of IBM i platform experience and cross-platform expertise spanning RPG, COBOL, Java, Python, cloud integration, and DevSecOps. Whether your project begins with AI-powered code analysis, a TimeBridge™ modernization assessment, or staff augmentation to fill immediate IBM i skill gaps, Programmers.io offers the flexible engagement models, from dedicated developer placement to full managed delivery with the Happiness Guarantee.
A new era in IBM i modernization is here.
Ready to explore TimeBridge™ can do for your IBM i environment? Contact Programmers.io to schedule a modernization assessment.
